The Salzkammergut, the ‘salt domain’, is a stunning district of lakes and mountains sprawling out to the east of Salzburg. It was over this region that Prince-Bishops of the City went to battle with their Hapsburg rivals for the ancient mines of a substance, which today sits on every kitchen table, but back then was the only preservative for food in existence, and worth its weight in… well, salt. Predating gold in value, it even gave the English language the word ‘salary’.

This region of clouded peaks and mysterious valleys, deep caves and dark woods, was also the centre of some of Europe’s most extensive witch trials. I have written before about the “wild women” of the Untersberg massif, but they are matched by the tales of the Northern Limestone Alps, more properly called the Totes Gebirge, the ‘Dead Mountains’.

Of course, while the names and history make it sound as foreboding as a hiking trip to Mordor, on a warm day in September there are few places in the world more soothing to walk: a rural idyll of sloped forest and sky-reflecting waters, its well-tended paths ending in fine hostelries – more Rivendell than Mount Doom.

For example, there is the sun-strewn terrace of the Fischerhutte restaurant on Lake Toplitz, serving the day’s catch alongside a glass of chilled Grüner Veltliner, with or without the refreshing spritz.

Meanwhile, beneath the deceptively still waters, this is the only place to combine the crypto-zoology of Loch Ness with the klepto-economy of the Third Reich.

Although the hunt for the Nazi gold that is said to lie in its depths has never pulled up any actual metal, it did bring up almost £100 million in forged British currency, the printed produce of the aborted Operation Bernhard to collapse the UK economy.

That, however, is only what the surviving salvage divers have found – the lake has claimed at least seven lives since the war, and this is despite diving there being outlawed for unexplained reasons. It might seem odd that a 100 metre-deep body of freshwater should claim so many expert lives, but only if one ignores its many unexplored and uncharted caves.

Should your tastes tend more towards l’art nouveau than les histoires gothiques, then an hour’s drive away you can find the largest of the lakes, the Attersee, which encompasses the island on which Gustav Klimt liked to spend his summers, practising his craft on sky and water.

In the midst of all of these bodies of water, there lies the 14,000-soul spa town of Bad Ischl.

A fashionable resort with royalty and their courts since the time of Prince Metternich in the mid-nineteenth century, although the historic Hotel zur Post dating from that bygone age has been closed and converted to apartments, one can still reside in similar style at the Villa Seilern and eat at the Konditorei Zauner, the oldest coffee-house in Austria.

Bad Ischl is where Emperor Franz Joseph became engaged to his famously beautiful future Empress, Elizabeth of Bavaria, ‘Sisi’, and where they built their spectacular palace, the Kaiservilla in which they spent their summers.

Completed in 1860, it is open to the public although it is owned and inhabited by the couple’s arch-ducal great grandson. Impressive architecture and stunning gardens – in the English manner – to one side, it is also most noted for being where Franz Joseph signed the declaration of war by Austria-Hungary on Serbia on July 28, 1914, following the assassination a month earlier of his heir – his nephew Franz Ferdinand and his wife Sophie – by Gavrilo Princip, a pan-Serbian nationalist.

Franz Joseph left Bad Ischl, which he had once described as “Heaven upon Earth”, two days later, never to return. He had just begun the Great War, and so the twentieth century was born.